Tiny grains from a distant asteroid are revealing clues to the magnetic forces that shaped the far reaches of the solar ...

In June 2018, Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission reached asteroid 162173 Ryugu. It studied the asteroid for about 15 months, ...

New research based on samples from asteroid Ryugu reveals that phosphorus-rich compounds could explain how Earth became ...

Could asteroid grains be at the origin of the first building blocks of life on Earth? This is what recent discoveries from space dust suggest. These fragments, brought back by a Japanese probe, ...

Researchers at the Advanced Photon Source joined an international effort to study tiny fragments of a nearby asteroid. The ...

Pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, are being studied at Brown as part of an effort to ...

A distant interstellar cloud was found to contain an abundance of pyrene, a type of large carbon-containing molecules known ...

The space agency defied incredible odds to get its asteroid-hunting OSIRIS-REx spacecraft off the ground. Since then, the ...

Now, a new study in Nature Astronomy, based on analysis of microscopic grains of the asteroid Ryugu, brought back to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft in 2020, provides more evidence that our ...

A large amount of pyrene, a carbon-rich molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, has been found in a distant ...

The discovery provides further clues to an astrochemical mystery: Where does carbon, the building block of life, come from and go to in the universe, including in our own solar system?

Asteroid Ryugu, formed billions of years ago, was shaped by processes in the early solar system, including freeze-thaw cycles that fractured its rocks and allowed water to alter its composition.